Tuesday, November 27, 2007

It is time to cast your votes (one ballot per person please!) for the Utah Bloghive Advisory Board. Five of the following candidates will be elected to serve on the board. Anyone is welcome to vote. (After all, how could I stop them?) My hope is that the board will represent a diversity of opinions. Toward that end, I've put together a poll that allows you to rank these candidates in the order of your preference. It is an example of "Instant Runoff Voting" or "Preference Voting". I'm a big fan of the principle.

To vote, visit the following link and rank the candidates. I really encourage you to check out the link at the bottom of the poll to understand how it works.

Here is a recap of the final candidates you're voting on and their blogs. Their names are in alphabetical order below and in randomized order on the ballot. (The poll doesn't have links to the blogs, so I provide them here for convenience.)

Saturday, November 17, 2007

If there is sufficient interest, I'd like to form a Bloghive Advisory Board. Here is the vision. We'll form a five member board that votes on administrative issues for the bloghive site. When new sites are recommended for the bloghive, the board will vote to decide on inclusion. The board will also decide the categorization of each new blog.

Being on the board won't be very time consuming; it is mostly just an email list. I'd like the board to be composed of bloggers currently on the site from across the spectrum. The site should continue to aggregate political content from the broad diversity of opinions represented in our state. I want to continue to have the site focus on political commentary rather than on personal or entertainment commentary.

If you would like to nominate a blogger to serve on the board, send an email to bab-nomination@utahbloghive.org. I'll collect nominations for one week and then I'll put up an online poll for one week to allow people to vote. You're welcome to nominate yourself or other bloggers you like to read. I'll get permission from the blogger before I include them in the election. Assuming I can contact all the candidates, we'll post the poll the Monday after Thanksgiving.

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Well, the Utah school voucher referendum has likely failed. Now we can all settle down and get back to loving our neighbors and eating green Jello with carrot shavings (or orange Jello with celery bits). Next time we bring this issue up, can we all play nice and respect others' opinions? Perhaps try to tell the truth, not mislead, and not paint our opponents as the devil (after all, we know he's at the convention)?

And maybe not spend so much money next time, too. According to the New York Sun, more than $8 million have been spent in Utah on the voucher issue (more than spent in the last gubernatorial race). I understand the need to saturate the "market" with billboards, signs, print, television, and radio ads, mass mailings, and telephone calls, but the deluge reached Biblical proportions at our house this week. In one week's time, we received at least eight glossy, full-color, unique pamphlets in the mail (addressed to various combinations of our names, plus the ubiquitous "Resident"). And the telephone calls! Yesterday I received four automated calls, each extorting me to vote "Yes" on Referendum 1. Today I received four more--one was automated, three were real live people, somewhere in the world, asking me to go to the polls and vote for the voucher program. All of these calls were paid for by "Parents for Choice in Education".

I understand the need to "get out the vote". I support the voucher program (sometimes in spite of Parents for Choice in Education). And here's the weird thing--Parents for Choice in Education should have known this. They called me two weeks ago and asked if I was willing to put a sign in my yard. I told them yes, but they never got back to me, so my yard is, sadly, signless. So somewhere in their many lists of numbers, they should have known that I was already converted. And perhaps--just perhaps, they could have saved a little money and limited the telephone calls to my home, at least, to maybe one or two a day.